Holiday Activities & Food (HAF) at the CAP Centre

Below is a blog post from our very own volunteer Kalman Dean-Richards, who has attended Holiday Activities & Food (HAF) sessions down at the CAP Centre during the school half-term.

HAF is a grant programme that enables local voluntary and community organisations in Sandwell to provide activities and food to children aged 5 – 16 during the school half term.

In the style of Storyteller Peter Chand, I’ll open with a riddle:

“If you cut me, there’ll be tears.”

Stick around for the answer.

With the disruption to school timetables caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re going to be hearing a lot over the next few years about ‘making up for lost learning time’. Quite rightly. Unfortunately, the national obsession with exam-driven education makes it rather likely that creative subjects (storytelling, performance poetry, beatboxing) will leave empty handed when the after-school sessions are ladled out.

Enter The CAP Centre, Smethwick, run by the tireless Raj Chaggar. They’ve teamed up with Black Country Touring, Performance Poet Dreadlock Alien (aka Richard Grant), and Storyteller Peter Chand, to deliver a healthy serving of creative arts, hot food, and a dollop of just the kind of wholesome community building that the pandemic period has left us all a little deficient of.

“Unleash that energy,” Dreadlock Alien sets out his mission statement – a bold one, with 20 kids aged between 5 and 10 in the room. He’s true to it – handing a mic to an insanely proficient beatboxer that’s half his height, instigating rhyme battles, stop animation classes, quickfire compliment sessions. The kids are hilarious, the atmosphere’s electric…

…and so it’s even more miraculous, rewinding a few days, to see them so still, so silent, so hooked, as Peter Chand leads them through the Indian savanna, into the mind of a moralistic monkey as he takes it upon himself to inflict a comical nose upon every elephant that will ever exist in retaliation to the actions of one. There are gasps. I stifle my own. The children write their own stories. A tiger cries for her lost cubs, stains her fur with tears. The level of inventiveness is genuinely obscene.

And then what better time for the elephant in the room: lunch.

These sessions are funded via the Department for Education’s ‘Holiday Activities and Food Programme’, aimed at providing a healthy meal and enriching activities for children who receive benefits-related free school meals.

It’s clearly a great scheme, harnessed by the brilliant CAP Centre, Chand, and the Dreadlock Alien. There’s no doubt it’s a real lifeline to families who are on the breadline, for whom holidays can present a real pressure point.

But, in the opinion of this writer, it doesn’t go far enough. In 2021, the scheme funds only 6 weeks per year, only 4 days per week. There are 13 weeks of school holiday, at least 5 working days in a week. Do the challenges of low-income families evaporate on Fridays?

This government has made quite clear how it feels about feeding children during the holidays. It’s to them that I offer the answer to my riddle (“If you cut me, there’ll be tears”). Not onions, as you may have guessed (admit it), but the ‘Holiday Activities and Food Programme’.

This scheme should, and must remain in place. It must not be diced up in a post-pandemic portion of austerity. It must be expanded to cover more than the arbitrary period that it already does. And ultimately, some form of it should be made available to all children, so that every 8 year old gets a chance to beatbox with the Dreadlock Alien, and to create new worlds with Peter Chand.